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For this Blog Hop our fearless wrangler Jay Cassels asked us to write about transitions. He said, “The Summer solstice represents the transition from action to nourishment, which is exactly what the Sun gives us during the long nights of summer, both to our actual crops but also to the continual journey we travel from darkness to light.

With this in mind it’s time to shuffle your best tarot deck, adorn yourself in Solstice regalia, and raise a glass as we explore the topic below…” He gave us two paths to take and I chose the second path.

Path Two: Darkness to Light

The power of the Tarot is well known for its transformative and healing properties. It seems to lift burdens and bring joy where there wasn’t any before. Therefore, how has Tarot helped to transform you, or your clients.

Tool of Transition

Sometimes I dabble in fortune-telling with my tarot cards and looking at what the future may bring, but I am more likely to use my tarot cards as a tool of growth. The cards help me explore situations and provide unexpected insights that help me to make sense of situations that I might have been confusing. There are three primary ways that tarot helps me to grow: Daily Readings, Trauma Readings, and Readings by Others. I’ll explore each of these below.

Daily Readings

Daily readings ground me and make sense of what’s going on in my world on any given day. I use a different card each month and my standard process is:

• Record the weather, sunrise/sunset times, and the moon phase
• Write a brief (or sometimes not so brief) recording of where I’m at and what’s going on in my world
• Pull a card and record my first impressions
• Look up the meaning of the card in the little white book. I know that a lot of readers like to read cold and just look at the traditional meaning or the impressions, but I find that it really helps me to understand what the deck creators view of the card was. I always find some phrase that jumps out at me
• Journal on the card. Journaling pulls out insights that I might not have thought of any other way and it generally ties to where I’m at at the time.

The following is a reading from September 25, 2022 using the Gentle Tarot.

The Gentle Tarot: Four of Cups

Posted on September 25, 2022 by raine.clara.shakti

Deck:  The Gentle Tarot

First Impressions:  This card gives off waves of melancholy and sadness.  The person has very much withdrawn into themselves.  I also see a glimpse of a raven behind the person.

Book:  I sit, listen, heal and then return home-ready to smell the flowers.

Guidance:   Take time for yourself, but know when to come back

Journaling:

This card is a good reminder that it is okay to go within and take time for myself, but it is also important to be able to come out of the darkness and reengage.  I am realizing that I need this daily dark time on a regular basis or I get cranky.  For me, it is especially important during Mercury Retrograde to have time for me and to make time to chill, to relax, to be alone.  

I also need to take time to engage with nature.  It was so nice to go to Shaker Nature Center yesterday.  I missed taking that time to relax and enjoy nature.  To walk slowly and to really feel the fresh air on my face and smell the scents.  I think I’m going to figure out how to fit that into my regular routines.  One of the lessons I learned at da Bird was about Key Standard Routines or KSRs.  These are the routines that keep things humming along.  There were also regular operational reviews and I don’t take time to review where my life is on a regular basis.  I think I am going to schedule a monthly operational review on the 6th of every month to check in with myself and take time to connect with my soul.

Where I’m At:  I’m home today, just chilling.  I did spend about 3 hours cleaning the kitchen and it looks so much better.  It feels good to have gotten all the counters clean and to have picked up the garbage.

Weather:  It’s been overcast and rainy today.

Moon Phase:  New Moon

Sunrise / Sunset: 7:15/ 7:19

Trauma Readings

I do a lot of different readings to explore various aspects of my life, but I do trauma readings specifically to dig into situations that are bothering me, explore my behavior and what the root cause of bad behavior is, and to look for how I can heal. I use the Tarot of Trees for trauma readings specifically because there are no people that might remind me of people in my life.

Although the questions in my trauma readings are always a little bit different, the general format follows this post Tarot Trauma: What is my parent’s trauma? As this post was long, I did not replicate it all here, but did include the spread and the meaning behind the questions.

What is the situation? In this case, I was asking for clarification as to what my parent’s combined trauma was. I had written individually about my mother’s trauma and my father’s trauma, but here I looked at their combined trauma.

How does this impact me emotionally? This question helps me ferret out the sometimes unexpected emotional aspects of trauma. Interestingly, the four of swords was telling me that I had processed a lot of the trauma from an emotional perspective.

How does this impact me spiritually? Answering this quesstion helps me assess how the trauma has impacted my relationship with my higher power, my goddesses, and other helping spirits. The five of swords in this position tells me that the dysfunctional religion of my parents continues to impact me.

How does this impact me physically? Trauma has physical impacts on the body and sometimes they are not completely understood. This card helps me to understand how an aspect of trauma has impacted my body and health. Justice in this position told me that despite the poor body image messages from my parents, I’d reached a point where I had a choice about how to treat my body.

How do I heal? The ultimate goal of trauma work is to uncover the impacts of trauma and work to heal them. The Wheel of Fortune in this position tells me that even though my heritage is the luck of the draw, I still have a responsibility to work toward my own healing.

My kamikaze little self which has historically been incapable of being kind to myself, wanted to establish a very rigid schedule where I did trauma work every Thursday. However, this was incredibly overwhelming for me and did not give me enough time to process.

Readings by Others

Readings by trusted readers give me perspective on subjects where my own feelings my cloud my ability to read impartially. I turn to others for readings on love especially as my own readings either show me my fears or my hopes. When I have others read for me, I can get a more realistic view of the current situation and about how it is impacting me.

In my most recent reading, my reader validated my intuition about how someone was a mirror for me both good and bad and helped me to see the next steps to help me learn to love myself and to open myself up to the love of my life time. I’m working hard on the advice that I was given.

One of my “rules” for working with other readers is that what they tell me has to resonate true for me. I’ve had readers give me guidance that didn’t resonate with me and my guides. When guidance resonates with me, it doesn’t mean that I necessarily like it, but it does mean that it passes a gut check.

Conclusion

Tarot can be an amazing tool of transformation, but what I have learned through personal experience is that transformation is hard and that tarot can provide a pathway, but it is not a magic solution for change: We still have to be willing to do the work.

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